Creativity's a driving force in human nature. We invent, we make, we try things out and we seek the unexpected. However, we all know the challenges of life that force us to be habitual, conformist and routine. They may be because our school, our work, or our family life. Or how can you wear something different, when all of your mates think it's strange? How can you eat something different when there are dietary restrictions in your society or your culture? How can you give something different, when all you have when you are ill, or when you are unable to leave the house? Researcher Teresa Amabile says creativity gets killed every day in the work environment for business reasons such as coordination, productivity and control. We all know what that's like. Being creative does require an effort to overcome these constraints or at the least to find a way to work within the constraints and be creative. Not just for class but for your own personal creativity, to change ourselves and to be more creative. It takes some courage to publicly express our creativity, whether to one person or to many people. Amabile's component theory of creativity, it defines three main areas of creativity. There's creative skills, expertise, and motivation. Creative skill is what we are working at in this course. Expertise is technical and procedural knowledge. Importantly however, much of what we do as creatives is influenced by own motivation. We may have the skills and resources to be creative but without motivation we'll not be as creative as we could be. Research has shown that motivation is an extremely important element in being creative. It's generally accepted there are two forms of motivation, external and internal. External motivation comes from the outside in the form of punishment or reward. You get paid or you could get a bonus at work, so you do well. That's the idea. You do poorly at school, and you get punished with bad grades. These are examples of external motivation or extrinsic motivation. These are the ones we hear about in the news, and a lot of the times, people think they work extremely well. They seem, however, to be the way people get to do almost anything, like work harder, get better grades, or in our case, be more creative. The trouble is, according to Daniel Pink in his book Drive, it doesn't always work that way. First of all, type X or external motivation, tends to require more and more incentives to achieve the same result. Things cost more as you go along. Second, it actually decreases the quality of the effort, it makes you less creative. Amabile has identified what is called the intrinsic motivation principle of creativity. And she says, people will be the most creative when they feel motivated primarily by interests satisfaction and challenge of the work itself and not by external pressures. In other words, you're being creative for yourself and for your own reasons and for your own pleasure. This may mean you solve a challenge in a way that is less efficient, more unusual, more interesting and different than the well worn path that's been presented from conformity. And that's one of the goals of course, of this course. Develop habits and curiosity to break out of our habits for reasons other than the direct reward. People really want to do something completely different and are less interested money and more the impact of their ideas and efforts. That's what's worked for me. Now at the beginning of the course, I said that the only truly wrong answer is one answer. We all need to develop a wide range of ideas. Of course, some of these ideas will be good, some bad, some wonderful and some really bad. All the range of answers we develop however, are important in our quest for creativity. That awful answer just might give us the key to a breakthrough in another way. This also means that the unpredictability of creativity is valuable in of itself. If you're going to be creative, we may end up with something that doesn't work, that isn't perfect, or that isn't what we expected. That's the nature of creativity. Failure happens and it's part of the normal creative process. The slogan of the designers from IDEO says it best, Fail early, fail often, for from these failures you will find new and interesting and life changing results. Anyway, additional information on the work mentioned here on this lecture is on the list of recommended readings. Including the works by Teresa Amabile, Daniel Pink, and Tim Brown, CEO from IDEO. Also a link to the Wikipedia definition of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, is included as well.
